What If Everyone Lived Underground?

If humanity crumbled on the surface, could you actually survive underground long term? How could you make sure you don't run out of food? Where would you get your power?

In some of the wealthiest corners of the world, the very rich are putting their money towards building underground bunkers to survive the apocalypse.

These subterranean safe havens are designed to withstand disasters like dirty bombs, pandemics, and their aftermaths.

First things first, if we want to survive in our new underground homes, it’s going to take some serious planning and supplies. You’d probably want a team with you to keep up with all the work required to keep things going. But even if you had all that, could your mind handle the psychological dangers involved?

Before we worry about anything else, the first thing we need to figure out is how to power our bunker. Well, it’s safe to assume that any cataclysmic event would’ve wiped out our power grid, and any hydro workers are probably dead or hiding in their own bunkers.

So the obvious solution would be just to plop a bunch of solar panels down, and then we’d be good right? Not exactly. Depending on what the conditions are like above the surface, solar panels might not even receive any sun, and we probably couldn’t venture out to maintain them.

Instead of looking up, we might be better off digging further down to take energy from the Earth itself. Geothermal energy is the heat of the Earth, extracted from hot water and rock, and it’d probably be our best bet.

Once we’ve got the lights on, we’ll need to find access to fresh water. Again, seeing that it’s probably too dangerous to leave the bunker, it’d probably be more difficult than setting something up to collect rainwater.

So we’ll dig some more until we hit a source. But we’d have to be very careful: for one thing, all this water would need to be purified before drinking, and we’d also have to contain the source to avoid flooding. This is a bunker, not an in-ground pool.

All this digging would make us pretty hungry, so we’d have to stock up on lots of canned food before bunkering down. Non-perishable meals would do wonders, but the supply would only last so long.

If we wanted to outlast it, we’d have to set up some hydroponic gardens to grow fruits and vegetables, and we’d be best to bring farm animals with us. Hey, we never said this had to be a small bunker.

One thing most people don’t think of in these highly sophisticated survival plans is what we would do with our poop. If we just let our bodily waste pile up somewhere, we’re probably going to get sick real quick.

So why not put it to good use? Our waste could be employed to fertilize the soil we grow our vegetables with, we’d just need to install some sort of ventilation.

Even if we could figure this all out, there’s still one more thing we could fall victim to: our minds. Because we wouldn’t be receiving our daily dose of sunlight, we wouldn’t get any Vitamin D, and that would make us depressed and irritable.

Add to that, the fact that we’ll all be cooped up in the same space, and things could get ugly pretty quickly. So, even though surviving underground is technically possible, it would require extensive resources, and would probably be pretty miserable.

But hey, these are billionaires trying to build bunkers right now, so maybe one of them will figure out a way to safely replicate the sun’s rays.